[SOLVED] Access your computer's full power from anywhere?

[MRolland]

Can you access your desktop computer's full power when away from home? (cpu/gpu). Like a remote desktop control. I know you can use some remote desktop control softwares but as far as I know you can't take advantage of your home GPU.

The point is when I'm at work or somewhere else in the world, can I just use my monitor and access my computer's full potential from home ? Like for example to play a game, or to edit large 4k videos

 

[sgsharkie]

No, the graphics capability is limited by the device you are using, as is the processing ability. You can 'instruct' the remote device to complete tasks and it will do so but in terms of graphics and speed, it will effectively scale down to the hardware in the device you are using.

 

[bill001g]

This is fallacy with these so called cloud based gaming things you see lately.

Lets say you have a high end monitor that can do the new HDR 4k at say 120hz. This is too fast to even run on the fastest display port monitor cables currently on the market. That cable can do 32gigabit.

When you look at a network connection where it is still pretty rare to even have a one gigabit of bandwidth getting one that has 32 is not likely to ever happen.

So it is pretty much impossible to have a remote high quality video. You have to give something up. Much less screen size and much less frame rate. Still even a normal 1024 monitor feed at 30hz will not fit in 1gbit unless you compress the data. There is a trade off fast compression that does a poor job or a good compress that takes time. When you consider cgi movies are rendered/compressed over a period of days it is not going

Now if you wanted to say run a rendering program that uses the power of your GPU to do it that would work but that is pretty much you click start and then come back later and look at the results. It is not a interactive thing.

 

[sc2lines]

This a streaming software I've have been playing with recently.....https://moonlight-stream.org/ , using my x3900@4.3ghz oc and a Raspberry pi4..and Linux Mint 19.2 ...with success.. actually worked quite nicely.....you may want to check it out

 

[gggplaya]

Parsec is another game streaming service you can use. Say you're away on business travel, or vacation. You can leverage your desktops power to play single player non-competitive games. There's probably too much latency to play competitive multiplayer.

https://parsecgaming.com/

 

[SamirD]

I can, but I'm not doing anything too video intensive.

There are ways to get the gpu involved, but it's still an emerging field. What I've learned is just to use xeon processors without an igpu and a lot of the rdp graphics processing will be sent to the fast gpu you have installed, at least this is what I've observed in my setup. ymmv.

 

[Kanai123]

You can remotely access your computer using tools like on premise R-HUB remote support servers, Logmein etc. They work well.

 

[Solandri]

It's not quite as bad as the above replies say.

The cloud gaming services, game live streaming programs, and more generic remote desktop tools make use of the h.264 encoder built into modern GPUs. They take what's supposed to be displayed on the screen, compress it with h.264 in real time, and transmit that over the network. The receiving computer simply sees a video stream just like a streamed movie. Decompress and display it, and you have a live view of the sending computer's desktop (with a few tens of ms of latency, and compression artifacts).

How tolerable this is depends on your network connection. Steam Link did a pretty good job of it for games, but required a max of 25 Mbps. It could however work with as little as 3 Mbps (though obviously with more severe compression artifacting). It's limited to 1080p and 60 fps though.

Other desktop sharing services like Splashtop do the same thing, and some are designed to work over the Internet in general. Their limitation is usually your home network connection (particularly upload speed). If your home connection is fast enough, you can get tolerable quality out of this. I'm not sure if any of these are capable of streaming 4k desktops yet.

The situation should get better as GPU hardware becomes faster. Most video streaming services have transitioned to h.265, which in my experience offers similar video quality as h.264 for about 70% the bandwidth. But h.265 encoding is still very CPU/GPU intensive, and AFAIK can't be done yet in real-time.